Mark Siedle

How did you get into your current job/field?

My wife left a PHP/MySQL book lying around the house (Welling Thomson). I was curious, picked it up, and was absolutely hooked on programming from that point. It spoke to me in ways the Java courses at university had failed to do. I finally understood the magic of how e-commerce websites worked, from security and databases through to performance, and I learned some core HTML/CSS that has served me well ever since (hello tables!).

After roughly 7 years of that, and dipping my toes into VB.NET, C#, and MSSQL, I had an opportunity to join an iOS crew, just after the iPhone had launched. A small, tight-knit team of misfits, we were riding the wave from Steve Jobs and Apple, all wearing Razer Kraken green headphones and writing the best code of our lives. Objective-C fascinated me with its memory management and navigation stacks, and mobile introduced me to desktop-like programming and UX that I hadn't experienced before. I was hooked again. I had found my people.

I focused on iOS for roughly 7 years, while writing my own .NET services to support these apps. But the industry was moving to Swift, and I was getting bored of what felt like change for change's sake. I read The Mythical Man Month (Brooks). The quote: "Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them." spoke to me like nothing before. I'd also started reading Code Complete (McConnell) and realized I wasn't alone when reading a chapter on writing programs for people first, and computers second.

My wife was working as a Support Lead for a small 10-person company at the time called Octopus. She said to me "You should consider applying here. They code like you.", referring to my values (or perhaps my OCD) when it came to writing clean and intuitive code, and having strong opinions on UX.

I was curious, so I downloaded Octopus 2.6, installed it locally, and had my mind blown. I had never experienced a single-page application on the web before (at least not a good one). I clicked a menu and only the parts of the page that needed to be updated did. It reminded me of iOS ... but it was web! I thought "These guys are wizards. How are they doing this?!"

I proceeded to download and reverse-engineer their minified .js files over the weekend to understand how this thing was working. A lot of it was obfuscated, but I saw so many similarities to iOS with Models/Views/Controllers and I could easily reason about how data was moving from the front-end to the back-end via the API. I got some confidence and was hooked again with something new and interesting.

I had zero experience with Angular and limited experience with C#, but I threw myself into the ring and was offered the opportunity to join Octopus.

Roll forward roughly 7 years again, and I've moved through Engineering and Team Lead roles to now Senior Engineering Manager, where I'm fortunate enough to guide and support healthy teams who value the sort of things I value: Good foundations; making it simpler and safer for our teams to make changes to Octopus.

What's a fun fact about you that people may not know?

We live on a 10-acre homestead-style property (that used to be part of a golf course) an hour outside of Brisbane, where we're slowly but surely building a food forest. At 5 pm each day, I head out to water a range of different trees and get to see the growth happening across the property.

What is your favorite project you've worked on at Octopus Deploy so far?

There are too many to count. But I led a small team to deliver Runbooks. The feedback we received from customers was overwhelmingly positive and the feature was a pillar of our current marketing strategy at the time. I've been proud to see that grow and become more useful to customers.

Do you have any hobbies outside of work?

Outside of work, I'm gardening, taking headshots in PUBG, making margaritas, listening to alternative rock (think Chevelle, Sleep Token, Godsmack, TOOL), smashing golf balls, and chaining episodes of Dragon Ball.

What excites you most about working at Octopus Deploy?

Our Engineering department ... it aligns with my values. Remote work where you can properly focus, short and to-the-point meetings, customer-first thinking, accountability for delivery, with realistic and sustainable timelines that can be negotiated when we discover the unexpected.

If you could eat one meal for the rest of forever - what would it be?

Tough one, but I'd say fresh rye or sourdough, lightly toasted with lashings of butter, topped with a freshly made omelette with garlic and cherry tomatoes I've picked from the garden, lightly topped with grated cheese (a Colby cheese that melts into the eggs). For sides, some chips with garlic aioli and, finally, a large vanilla thickshake with a swirl of condensed milk.